India’s MAMI Mumbai Film Festival is rolling out round two of its MAMI Select – Filmed on iPhone program, expanding to four languages with a high-profile mentor lineup of Indian cinema heavyweights.
The initiative has assembled a mentor panel including actor-director Konkona Sen Sharma (“A Death in the Gunj”), and filmmakers Lijo Jose Pellissery (“Jallikattu”), Vikramaditya Motwane (“CTRL”) and Vetrimaaran (“Viduthalai”). The mentors will guide the selected filmmakers through pre-production to post-production.
The 2025 program will select four emerging directors to create short films in the Hindi, Malayalam, Marathi and Tamil languages. Each filmmaker will receive a production grant along with an iPhone 16 Pro Max and MacBook Pro for shooting and editing.
Sen Sharma lauds the initiative’s “focus on enabling and providing a platform to fresh young filmmaking voices, while Pellissery says, “Given the diversity of Indian cinema, I was so happy to hear that the aim of this program is to identify and support filmmakers from different regions of India.”
Motwane, returning as mentor, says: “I was completely blown away by the quality of the storytelling and the technical finesse of the short films last year. I cannot wait to see what kind of magic the new batch of filmmakers create this year.”
The completed shorts, running 20-40 minutes, will premiere at a special screening before hitting MAMI’s YouTube channel.
Festival director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur notes this marks the first time MAMI has opened applications nationwide. “I would really like to build on this great initiative so that we can extend this opportunity to many more emerging filmmakers next year,” he says.
Applications are open through Jan. 19.